I seem to be writing a lot of these What the heck was that? columns explaining recent news events. This time it is the firing of Carol Bartz as CEO of Yahoo. I’m not here to defend Bartz, whom I would have fired long ago (or more probably not hired in the first place), but I want to make the point that for all her failings, Bartz was mainly fired for being a hardass. It’s not what she did or didn’t do as much as her style while doing it.

Carol Bartz is, like beer, an acquired taste. I like her, but she has a long history of bothering sensitive geeks. The old-timers at Autodesk (a very geeky company where she was CEO) absolutely hated Bartz for her brusque style.

Some of this was casting. Remember Bartz was hired specifically to be not Jerry Yang, the Yahoo co-founder who preceded her as CEO. Jerry has a brusqueness of his own, but his brusqueness is on behalf of the geeks, since he comes from their ranks. To be different from Jerry yet also turn the company around pretty much required that Bartz piss-off nearly everyone, which she gleefully did. If the company was doing better business-wise, she’d still be getting away with it. But over the long haul Bartz came to be seen inside as a pain-in-the-ass who also wasn’t delivering.

Some people will ask whether Bartz would have been fired with the same style and performance had she been a man? I think that had she been a man she wouldn’t have been hired in the first place, so the broader question is moot.

So what happens now for Yahoo? While it will be pitched differently than this, I expect the second coming of Jerry Yang. Jerry can’t be CEO again (or shouldn’t — he’s smarter than to try that) but the real power still lies with he and his cronies. They’ll choose somebody to take the CEO job but I think the company will be run more by consensus. Jerry’s a smart guy and he learns from his mistakes. But will it be enough to satisfy Wall Street? I don’t know.

For all Yahoo’s problems, this is the part of the show where I point out that Wall Street is really, really stupid about how tech companies should be managed. Analysts tend to take a structural approach, looking at inputs and outputs and cash flows like Yahoo or any of its competitors are manufacturing those electrons on assembly lines. It doesn’t work that way.

I’ve written about this many times over the years. These are companies built purely on intellect — companies where there are a few individuals who are capable of doing things that are unique in their enterprise. Imagine a General Motors where there was only one worker who could make really fine exhaust systems. That wouldn’t work in Detroit but it does work in Silicon Valley because the output of that one person can be amplified a thousand or a million times.

Look at Google and its acquisitions, for example. Google notoriously buys companies only to discard their products. This is clearly because Google is acquiring the people for their potential. Yet analysts wring their hands over the lost products as though that was what really mattered and the acquisitions had somehow failed. The truth is the products were inconsequential all along.

Are some individual contributors worth $100 million? Yes, though Wall Street gets that backward, too, thinking CEOs are worth that kind of money, which they aren’t.

Back to Yahoo, a distracted, demoralized, and not very efficient company. But at this point bringing-in a manager with the goal of increasing efficiency would I think be a mistake. People don’t get this. What Yahoo needs to do is dig deep in the human resources it already has and pull out something new that will change the game. And to do that the first thing the company needs to do is heal.

Next time around whoever runs Yahoo will have to be much more sensitive to cultural issues. They will want someone who can unite the company and create a more aspirational firm that looks to innovate and be forward thinking, yet also not trapped by the Jerry Yang syndrome of risk avoidance. Yahoo needs a bit of risk-taking at this point, but it would be a mistake to hire someone who comes in with the idea of making the company a more efficient machine.

93 Comments

Mike Duda
September 8, 2011 at 11:56 am

Isn’t your strategy like asking them to catch lightning in a bottle? Without a catalyzing figure (“calling Steve Jobs”), I don’t see this happening; if it were as easy as all that, the acquired and dismembered startups would have used all those good people to make transformative products themselves.

As I’ve written before, Yahoo was really damaged by the purchase of Broadcast.com back in the late 1990’s. They were totally snookered by Mark Cuban. As a result of that experience, Jerry Yang appears to have decided that every deal had to clearly work in Yahoo’s favor, be low risk, or it wasn’t worth taking. And over the long term Yahoo did fairly well that way. But this is an industry with inherent risks and those who succeed are the ones taking risks, which came to be NOT Yahoo. Big mistake. So the company was paralyzed. Now it has to be UN-paralyzed. That’s all I am calling for. They have the money to make some big product bets and I hope they do. They have the internal talent to cover those bets IF THEY TRUST THEIR GUT. Or hell, trust MY gut. I’ll gladly tell them what to do. But whacking another five percent out of the headcount, that’s meaningless.

l.a.guy
September 8, 2011 at 1:49 pm

“Yahoo was really damaged by the purchase of Broadcast.com back in the late 1990′s. They were totally snookered by Mark Cuban.”

Interestingly, Don Dodge thinks Mark Cuban would be a good choice for Yahoo CEO. It would be an interesting choice. I know you have a history with Cuban that might argue differently, but at least he’s someone who appreciates the geeks and would formulate a vision and execute on it. It may go down in flames, but at least it would be a coherent vision instead of the perpetually rudderless ship that Yahoo has become.

“I’ll gladly tell them what to do.”

What should they do? Because it looks to me like they’re running out of options.
So if

Charlie
September 8, 2011 at 6:51 pm

Have any of Cuban’s ventures really been profitable?

Yahoo still made $1 billion in profit last year. None of Cuban’s ventures have even come close to that.

Don Dodge knows a lot of folks and has the advantage of seeing both Microsoft and Google from the inside, but I don’t think he knows either Mark Cuban OR Yahoo. Mark Cuban is a brilliant INVESTOR, but as a manager, I simply don’t know. His talent with the Mavericks, after all, has been his willingness to INVEST in the team. My gut feeling is that Yahoo has too many moving parts for Cuban.

As for what Yahoo should do, I’d say that’s another column….

Timothy Post
September 9, 2011 at 3:29 am

I would suggest that what Yahoo! needs most right now is inspiration and innovation. My choice for the one person who could deliver in spades on both accounts would be Fred Wilson (http://avc.com). Thoughts?

J Peters
September 9, 2011 at 5:57 pm

Interesting flashback to Techcrunch where AOL just cleaned house.

Ronc
September 8, 2011 at 2:19 pm

“They have the money to make some big product bets and I hope they do. They have the internal talent to cover those bets IF THEY TRUST THEIR GUT. Or hell, trust MY gut. I’ll gladly tell them what to do.” OK, why not share your specific ideas with us, unless of course, you’re waiting to be hired as CEO?

Mark Cuban would make a lousy CEO – he’s never actually produced anything of value

Frank P
September 13, 2011 at 12:23 pm

Nobody mentions when they put Terry Semel in as ceo.They spent a good deal of money and time focusing on trying to put film on the internet and never did it. This is really where the company went nowhere. He was in charge for six years.

Nigel
September 8, 2011 at 12:38 pm

Though merely a watcher of this circus I can readily understand the points Bob makes about the way financial institutions measure success and predict business outcomes using the wrong paradigms. They miss the point that the real innovators don’t work like they do. I well remember that misfits poem used by Apple many years ago. It summed things up rather well.

Cracking the whip as a way to increase production may work in solid, physical manufacturing but, as Bob points about, amplifying one person with vision’s work instead of perhaps using many people’s struggling consensus is usually only possible in a nurturing environment. Surely.

Whip cracking works effectively only on slave ships. If you have more than one ship’s worth of rowers then the whip becomes weaker and its accuracy decreases. Whip cracking in several sophisticated forms works at Apple, but not many other places.

Strikelord
September 10, 2011 at 12:57 pm

Sooo…

You’re comparing/equating Apple to a slave ship…?

Kid
September 11, 2011 at 12:43 am

And without reference to Foxconn.

Joel Upchurch
September 8, 2011 at 1:03 pm

Steve Jobs was important as a product manager because he has a pretty good instinct for when products sucked. The reason it was important that that he was CEO, was because that meant he didn’t have a CEO over him, forcing him to ship products that sucked to meet artificial deadlines. What would have happened if Apple had shipped the Ipad 5 years ago or the Iphone 10 years ago? I guess we do know. Remember the Newton?

We might have Product Managers around that are as good as Steve Jobs, but how many CEOs are there that won’t second guess them when they are having a bad quarter?

Sometimes, I think it is better when products are developed in a skunk works and upper management doesn’t even know about them until they are done.

Grunchy
September 8, 2011 at 1:38 pm

I read an initial report that Bartz was fired and the board wants to sell Yahoo to somebody else. If that’s true then Yang won’t be CEO, neither will anybody else, except for Morse as interim. It would also mean that the board sees the company like rapidly spoiling fruit at a supermarket produce dept. that has to be sold fast before it becomes worthless and they have to pay to discard it.

If I were Microsoft I’d offer them 5 cents on the dollar!

Jimmy
September 8, 2011 at 5:43 pm

And Microsoft would do exactly what with Yahoo? Steve Ballmer is not known for daring flights of creative insight. Yang was no great shakes, but If shareholder abuse was a crime, Ballmer would get the electric chair.

The Yahoo board has to cover its own ass to some extent, but remember the people with real power there own shares to back up their positions. If they had announced hiring an investment banking firm that would be different. The was, I suspect, an event long in coming but probably precipitous in its actual execution. I doubt that they thought much past just firing Bartz.

Wail Street never seems to get tech. “product” is hopeless trash after 1-1/2 to 2 years. “concept” is obsolete before it gets out the door. “execution” doesn’t matter, to some extent, provided the overall “market vision” succeeds, for even if you can’t sell WidgetOne, if the environment succeeds and you get royalties by check or lawyer, you can succeed nicely.

R&D and the king geeks who don’t get out much are the core of the company, and the rest of it exists to make them productive. like a queen bee.

I will never shake the feeling that a bright tech company that goes public has a 99 percent chance of becoming irrelevant in under 5 years, precisely because Wail Street does not get the demands of tech evolution. and I think the IPO and cashout are likely to be the death knell for future innovation.

to quote from drow, I said it, you read it, I’m not taking it back.

Glenn M
September 9, 2011 at 11:33 am

It seems that tech companies work like creative agencies. I once worked on a project where a big agency was rolling out a new identity package. Everyone in the company had to get new business cards, and I looked at them and their titles. I figured out that 9-10% actually worked in creative. The rest handled answering phones and running the business so that 10% could have the time to come up with what was paying the bills for everyone else.

Tech companies are about that core idea, and manufacturing, if there is any, is usually a small part done by outsiders. Wall Street should look to TBWAChiatDay or other creative firms for understanding how they work.

Chad
September 13, 2011 at 1:08 pm

Bill Gates got that. He often said that at Microsoft, management’s job was to get things out of the way of the innovators.

Steve Ballmer doesn’t have that vision.

bob
September 8, 2011 at 2:59 pm

I dont think most people know how impossibly sick Yahoo’s culture has become. I dont know if Jerry Yang can sort it out with founder wisdom. The problem with being lost in the wilderness is that everyone on the inside knows it too, and slavishly works at odds with that reality, and people become incredibly bitter, disenfranchised and nobody can focus.

Working at Yahoo was one of the worst experiences of my life and I feel sorry for the people that are there churning away failing in the eyes of investors who want to part them out while they fail to capture and extend what Yahoo is even about.

In a way they are too good to go this route, but in a way they are so far from what it means to be an internet innovator that I dont know that “what to do” is even the issue anymore. I think its “who to be”, and they are not the right crowd anymore.

ah one, ah two
September 8, 2011 at 9:07 pm

Bob

Sorry to say, but I think you can substitute Yahoo with AboutAnyLargeCorporation in your write-up about toxic working conditions.

Just a thought

Joe
September 10, 2011 at 11:13 pm

I worked there too, and I totally agree with this comment. Yahoo is so horribly broken, nothing can fix them. They need to sell off everything except maybe Overture and fire everyone except those 10% that actually produce something of value.

If they can come up with something new and innovative they should try it. Otherwise, keeping up all that legacy garbage is just like carrying a bowling ball when you’re treading water.

Paul Allen
September 8, 2011 at 4:31 pm

12th!

you and me all the way Robert Young! what’s with all the n00bs on this blog all of a sudden??

Mike Duda
September 9, 2011 at 2:03 am

I’ve been a loyal reader for many years; I don’t often feel a need to comment. And now twice…Oh my!

Mac McCarthy
September 8, 2011 at 4:31 pm

Bring in Eric Schmidt….

It worked for Google!

Bill
September 8, 2011 at 4:34 pm

I just visited yahoo.com for the first time in years, and was treated to the sight of an enormous flash or java advertisement that sprawled across their home page, preventing me from reading any of the content. Classy.

Most people have Yahoo as their front page; the company is definitely salvageable. Flickr is great. Where they mainly fall down: 1) Flash and annoying javascript everywhere– why chase people away? 2) Video clips that only work about 10% of the time, because they are Flash, or some weird version of Flash, or something. YouTube manages to get its videos to work 95% of the time; Yahoo should be able to do this 3) OMG! —WTFCares? 4) Bing! If you can’t do search well, don’t bother to try!

I doubt that there is a single iPad owner who has Yahoo set as a browser home page. I doubt that there is a single Android device on the face of the earth with Yahoo as browser home page. There might be one on iOS or Android with Bing as a home page. (probably a serious pr0n junkie, Bing does that well. Er, so I’ve heard.)

Speaking as a tech journalist who got on the Net back in late 1991, I frankly doubt that there are a significant number of people under 30 who have ever heard of Yahoo¡ other than in the current context of Bartz’s departure.

I remember their search setup and why I ditched it for Altavista ASAP. My first reaction to the Yahoo story was “yahoo is still around? WHY?”

I don’t understand their rationale for existence. AFAIK, they do nothing novel or better than anyone else. If they have acquired useful technology, they should spin it out to somebody with a clue.

As for turning the company around, what’s there to turn around? The sole fault on Bartz’s part is telling the investors it could be turned around if she said anything of the sort to them, which I doubt. If she didn’t promise a turnaround, she’s blameless, she didn’t promise one and didn’t deliver one. I don’t think there is a CEO anywhere who could get a significant ROI on Yahoo on any other basis than parting it out to the highest bidder and hoping there are bidders.

If I got stuck with the Yahoo CEO gig, I’d be trying to sell “the portal” to Classmates.com or MyLife… i.e. sell the name as something archaic to companies whose business model is helping people celebrate their pasts… and use Yahoo¡ as the internal search engine logo element (using a real search engine for the internal search guts) I’d be looking for viable technologies acquired by the company and finding logical acquirers… and offering firesale prices.

In the history of computer science and programming languages, ECMAscript (“javascript”) is a milestone for a variety of technical reasons and Yahoo’s people have done more than any other company to help it along, even Google takes a back seat to them.

If this makes no sense to you watch the js lectures on Yahoo’s tech theater page, It may help to have a thorough understanding of the history of computer languages first.

Sean
September 9, 2011 at 4:09 am

If by most you mean none, no one I know has, or ever has had Yahoo as their home page. Google is what I think you meant….

Ronc
September 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm

I do understand your comment about the home page, though I’m not sure its “most”. I open my browser with any random favorite and use drop down, drop up menus or the Favorites folder or Bar to go where I want. But my wife often surprises me by saying she already heard about some technical news item or piece of celebrity gossip simply because of her default Yahoo home page.

Eh, no, Bartz was not hated at Autodesk because she was a hardass, She was hated because of her monumental greed and because she nurtured a really vicious form of company politics. Plus she made one stupid decision after another and was only saved by blind luck when the main competitor blew up.

When she arrived there was still enough of the John Walker legacy to keep the company relatively free of nasty politics and most importantly, give a sense of corporate unity to most employees. The company still had a very good feel about it. The division of the company stock option pool reflected this. Most went to the general employees. Within a short amount of time after Bartz arrived almost all the stock option pool went to Bartz and here cronies as “bonuses”, leaving the rest of the employees with almost nothing.

That’s why she was hated at Autodesk. Greedy and incompetent. But with superlatively well honed survival instincts. The Bartz and post-Bartz Autodesk bears not the slightest relationship with the original Autodesk. In all its quirky brilliance.

Her legacy seems to be toxic wherever she goes. The extremely tawdry manner in which she was fired from Yahoo was almost karmic. She always was a class act and she seems to have got the class send off she so richly deserved.

Hamranhansenhansen
September 8, 2011 at 11:30 pm

What is Yahoo! again? What does it do? Why should I care? I have been online since before the Web. I feel like I should probably be able to answer these Yahoo! questions, but I cannot.

Gotta say I’m one of those who ejected Yahoo years ago, when they got fat and greedy and put ads EVERYWHERE. They killed their directory when they started charging $300 to APPLY for a listing — Open Directory took (ODP) over for a while until ODP self-destructed from overzealous reactions to spammers, making it nearly impossible to become or stay an editor, so that new sites would pile up by the hundreds in every category.

A lot of people still use Yahoo, yes, out of habit. But if there’s a lot of technical brilliance in the company, I haven’t seen it come out, ever. Yahoo’s success came largely from its early start and catchy name… and in fairness to the quality of the original product. IMHO their big mistake was not wanting to give up a single penny of ad revenue… and their saving grace was big corporations’ desire to only deal with Name Brand publishers, allowing them to keep getting lucrative ad deals. (Though Google has, I’m sure, eaten into that.)

Chrissy
September 9, 2011 at 5:43 am

Its clear that Yahoo is headed for a total disaster unless some fundamental changes, both short term and medium in terms of policy, are made immediately:
1) Fire most of the main board, particularly Bostock. But also the other people – Kern, Joshi and James – mentioned in the Third Point Memo. They should be replaced by people with impeccable Media, Internet and Sales track records – people who have a better understanding of the internet industry – not people running airlines or dog sanctuaries!
2) Initiate an internal staffing policy that will favor promotion of consistently successful, long term, loyal employees over the hiring of outsiders. Excluding Yang and Filo and its non US based members the interim CEO and the so called Exec Leadership Council have a grand total of 6 – 7 years Yahoo! employment between them!!! 6 or 7 years! U-N-B-E-L-I-E-V-A-B-L-E. They barely know the company, and barely know the wide and complex range of products. A vast number of highly successful, loyal, long term employees have departed Yahoo as they realised there was no possibility of career advancement. With them went all the innovative ideas and creative soul of the company. How much has Yahoo spent on head hunters, training of new employees and golden parachutes for failed external hires the last 10 years? – an astonishing amount! How many of the people hired this way have been successful and stayed around? – Not many! Good companies have a good idea of who their stars are and work very hard to retain them. This has been the opposite case at Yahoo! for far too long. Why all the Media leaks? – staff loyalty and trust has been fatally eroded.
3) While availability of expertise varies according to function, part of 2 above should ensure that staff policy adjustments give all employees, whatever their role, something to aim for. One of Bartz’s biggest errors was the comment she made regarding tenure of sales people. As reported, that essentially blew up the US national sales team which is widely reported to be struggling to recover, particularly in key markets such as New York – the replacement managers are inevitably of lower quality (who would want a job at Yahoo! at the moment? – Even in this economy?) and have less Yahoo! knowledge than those they are hired to replace.
4) Invest in systems that will drive efficiencies in revenue generation through the existing business and help reduce loss of valuable data and relationships when people leave the company.
5) Try to lure back some of the previously key long standing senior employees who still have Yahoo! in their DNA.
6) Consider taking the company private – Wall Street doesn’t understand the internet business either and many of the mistakes have happened due to the pressures of quarterly reporting.
Yahoo! has a great platform and is arguably the oldest and most widely established brand in the internet world. Many of the critics fail to realise that the existing staff of more than 13,000 continue to generate hundreds of millions of $, while delivering great customer value, in spite of the internally adversarial state of the company. Its time to stabilise and secure the existing revenues of what remains a fabulous business while making the critical internal changes to put the company in the best position for growth. Bartz started it. A safe pair of hands is needed to steady things and move the ship forward .

S.
September 11, 2011 at 10:06 pm

I actually agree with this mentality. Speaking as someone who used to work for Yahoo many years ago, I really feel that even then the pressure of wall street really detracted from their core capabilities. Its a distraction and its one that I think they need to reign in and have a solid mgmt team and vision for their products. Privatization would remove all the unnecessary paperwork that goes with a public company and really help streamline them. Many of my old friends and coworkers that are still there really seem to think that would help refocus the company.

badsector
September 9, 2011 at 6:40 am

Technology companies, as you say, are built purely on intellect and then that some individual contributors are worth $100 million to an organization but that Wall Street gets it backwards thinking that the products and CEOs are what makes a company successful.

I wonder if we ran technology companies like a professional sports franchise. What would it look like if the intellectual assets were the athlete vs. the CEO/BOD were more like the Coach/Owner model?

That could be an interesting scenario to make into an article. But then again, what do I know. I do know that I enjoy the writing and I have been a loyal reader for many years.

Alejandro Garcia
September 9, 2011 at 7:12 am

What happened to the “Not in sillicon valley startup tour?”
when will episodes be available?

Francis
September 9, 2011 at 7:30 am

Sounds like Apple before the return of the prodigal son.

About the morale thing . . . Napoleon said the best way to improve and army’s morale is to give it a victory.

Y’know, the irony is that the companies those Wall Street analysts work for aren’t all that different from tech companies. Investment banks’ most important assets are their people – intellectual capital, in other words. They actively engage in a war for talent and, as with tech companies, they are beginning to move towards a post-knowledge economy where “innovation workers” (as opposed to knowledge workers) become the key drivers of competitiveness.

rickb928
September 9, 2011 at 10:18 am

“Are some individual contributors worth $100 million? Yes, though Wall Street gets that backward, too, thinking CEOs are worth that kind of money, which they aren’t.”

You’re right – Wall Street gets its OWN tech fine. Pay the quants stupid money to make HFT work, which is so much an analog to many web startups it is scary. Hi-Freq trading extracts wealth out of imbalances too fleeting to be exploited by humans. In the process, it is slowly destroying the stock market, but so long as it’s profitable, the brokers don’t care. And they will get paid to pick up the pieces anyways. The SEC is unable to address the ‘problem’ of HFT, largely because they can’t deal with the ethics. So many web startups were built on marginally ethical business models (web advertising, search, etc) but we haven’t the will or mechanisms to do anything about that. Wall Street is driven by profit. They understand tech when it’s profitable in a way they can grasp. Yahoo is now a largely conventional company that happens to make products that are better measured in something more intangible than cars or widgets, but Wall Street can still figure out if they are losing something tangible, like money. Which they are. Wall Street not getting tech? Actually, I’m pretty sure they do, and don’t think it’s all that cool. And yeah, tech has a way of not making money.

John Herndon
September 9, 2011 at 7:52 am

“For all Yahoo’s problems, this is the part of the show where I point out that Wall Street is really, really stupid about how tech companies should be managed. Analysts tend to take a structural approach, looking at inputs and outputs and cash flows like Yahoo or any of its competitors are manufacturing those electrons on assembly lines. It doesn’t work that way.”

You are right about Wall Street not understanding technology companies. You wrong about one thing – a business will not survive if it does not produce or do something useful and ultimately make money. There are a lot of smart people in the world who are also broke – At the end of the day, Yahoo is not producing any real lasting value. I hope the purchase of Motorolla works out Google!

From my perspective it seems like Yahoo decided about a decade ago that ‘the Internet was finished (ie complete)’. In the span of 10 years they have done very little to expand or rebuild their service platform. On top of that they did stupid things like buy Geocities for something like $100 per user rather than build their own competing product. They never invested in their infrastructure like Google has, they never built out a platform and let their developers see what they can do with it.

It was quite literally like they said, hey we are done. Lets monetize this now. Only they adopted a TV theory of monetization. In the TV world the platform is static and the content is what changes. Expectedly, Yahoo chased content while ignoring the platform. In the computer world the platform (hardware + software) can improve at something like 50% per year. If you stop advancing the rest of the world will pass you by in short order. The same thing happened to AOL.

Google meanwhile seems to understand this. How many times have we heard WS types say that only search makes money for Google, these other things are a waste of money. Android would not exist if not for ignoring Wall St. ‘wisdom’. And I’d be very surprised if the platform of various Google services does not become a major source of revenue over time. Google Apps for business (register your own domain then use it for home for free too) has the potential to take a lot of platform share away from Microsoft over the long haul. And if not, at least they tried. You can’t say the same for Yahoo.

WLH
September 11, 2011 at 9:05 pm

True, but Google also does a lot of its “innovations” in defense of the Search cash cow. Android is the perfect example, so is G+. Google doesn’t want to be in those businesses but has to in order to keep the mobile internet and social networks open, so no walled garden can remove Google Search.

But Google is definitely the opposite of Yahoo! when it comes to recognizing the evolving nature of the internet. Their creating of the mobile data center containers, their experiments with super-fiber, and my fave, Google Earth.

Even the name Yahoo! sounds like yesterday’s tech news.

o. nate
September 9, 2011 at 9:25 am

IMO, Yahoo still has the best finance portal and the best web email interface.

Bryce
September 9, 2011 at 10:33 am

I’m waiting to dance a jig over the demise of Yahoo when they get acquired or bankrupt. I’m patient I can wait awhile.

it should not go unmentioned that Bartz showed why she was CEO in her Fortune interview. dropped the F-bomb and said the board was a bunch of doofuses, among other things.

there is that little matter of a non-disparagement clause in the lovely $10 million parting gift. so Carol, gosh, sorry to see you go, hope you have a good life, and you can effin’ DIE UNDER A BRIDGE!!! because the board has taken back your parachute.

that is your typical book-learnin’ CEO of today. grab, piss, and moan, and get in the way of getting anything done.

heckuva a job, lady.

TemporalBeing
September 9, 2011 at 12:06 pm

What Yahoo! needs to do is sever its ties with Microsoft 100%. Get Bing! out of Yahoo!, and get back on the road of making great products.

And that’s just what I know about. They could also do a lot better job of contacts, synchronization with Android Contacts, calendar, email, and more. (Though they finally made Linux a supported system with e-mail with their latest web mail interface.)

Nigel Tufnel
September 9, 2011 at 1:14 pm

I would try to go after one of the Apple VPs who were considered as potential candidates for Apple CEO but weren’t chosen, such as Phil Schiller or Scott Forstall. I don’t know if they’d be interested, and I don’t know if they’d make great CEOs, but at least they have a long history of good relations with engineers and marketers, and certainly know what it takes to bring great products to market. Yahoo has a terrible recent history of finding great product ideas, and even when they get ideas, failing to bring them to fruition (*cough*LiveStand*cough*).

Ralph Spoilsport
September 9, 2011 at 6:32 pm

Has anybody noticed that Yahoo Mail is basically broken these days? And what’s with the stupid articles they publish which embarrass Yahoo on a daily basis?

Jerry
September 9, 2011 at 7:36 pm

Well, they now charge for POP access. Inconsistently, I might add. Is that what you meant?

I know I’ll be leaving those email accounts behind soon…

RogerMcK
September 9, 2011 at 7:13 pm

Who the heck needs Yahoo anyway? It’s a dead horse -

BozoTheClown
September 9, 2011 at 8:05 pm

By the time I got to the end of this article, I thought: substitute the name of the current U.S. President in place of Bartz.

as long as the administration sees itself as Chief Appeaser, you’re right. the guy got elected and almost overnight turned into an Eisenhower Republican, fighting with the Tea Party types.

chaps my behind. where did candidate Sgt. Rock go?

Pekka
September 10, 2011 at 1:54 am

Agree fully with “yet another mike”. On the main point though, I consider Yahoo to be pretty much unmanageable. At least as long as board and shareholders give you a short leach.
It’s like being in charge of an oil company, with huge reserves and thus great potential. The problem is, you do not know where those reserves are and how to tap them (nevermind knowing when you’ll strike a well). The only sensible management policy is one which bases on patience (while at the same time maximizing returns on existing wells (services). Sadly that does not go together with wall streets MO.

I’ve got a great opportunity for Yahoo. They should merge with AOL and a few other dated, irrelevant companies. They could market themselves to old people who don’t understand tech and can’t move on to anything modern.

Well put! Yahoo & AOL are dead horses that really need to die a quick painless death. Nobody needs or wants what they offer.

Joe Cassara
September 11, 2011 at 12:47 pm

Yahoo! needs an interim CEO who will sign on the dotted line when Microsoft comes knocking, again, take the money, run, and screw the geeks. Yahoo! is dead. And not “Apple circa 1998″ dead. It’s Intellivision dead.

What other long in the tooth internet properties can we smash together? AOL/Yahoo/Myspace/Livejournal? Is AOL going to turn into the place where web 1.0 properties go to die? The boneyard of the internet?

heh, put ‘em back on the end of a 56K line, which is what Da ISH was as The Connected Internet when the founders started having their initial what-ifs. ISH 0.6 beta for the companies that have devolved back to 0.6 beta.

hello!,I really like your writing so so much! percentage we keep in touch extra approximately your post on AOL? I need a specialist in this area to unravel my problem. Maybe that is you! Having a look forward to see you.